rvm had a substantial impact on ruby programming and for a long time brought lasting benefits to us, but honestly I need to stay agile and informed about other possibilities at this point. Lately I only get one version of Ruby to manage so I'm not sure if the benefit is outweighing the cost of configuration.

One alternative, rbenv, has worked well for me. rbenv is an alternative because it let's us set the global ruby version on a per-user basis, and like rvm offers support for per-project Ruby versions. Also you can override the Ruby version with an environment variable. I do not know what it's like yet to use ry. If anyone has used ry or the other alternatives, please share any knowledge or experience on this question I feel is important. I am always interested in things I have not heard of and knowing more about some of these alternatives to Ruby Version Manager (rvm). Also I feel grateful for Stackoverflow.com and this area of the internet's wealth of knowledge. Thank you.

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time is a cost, but I dont know I am unsure about what the alternatives to RVM are
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Bent CardanMar 11 '12 at 22:16

That's what I'm saying: what time? Setting up RVM requires a couple of minutes. Then it doesn't require any further configuration.
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Sergio TulentsevMar 11 '12 at 23:02

I re-installed fresh OSX 10.7 this weekend. Some trouble there with rvm running 1.9.2. I have 1.9.3 with rvm but this is maybe more symptomatic of 10.7.3 & Xcode, not really sure.
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Bent CardanMar 11 '12 at 23:49

1 Answer
1

There is one big difference between RVM and the rest of tools - RVM has big experience with a lot of corner cases, it covers many possible configurations, it is used on many different *nix distributions.

So all the small tools cover the minimalistic way of doing things, like installation:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/rubies/1.9.3
make
make install

Q: what prevents you from doing it ?
A: Experience, do you know it will exactly build and run on any system you try ? RVM does just that it tries to provide you one way to install on every system.

The mentioned ruby 1.9.3 will most likely compile just fine, but for example you can use patches, RVM does provide already many patches, few of them are installed automatically to solve compilation/building issues, like ruby 1.8.7 or 1.8.6.

But there are other things, you want to use JRuby on production (it happens to be faster) so you need to test it ... in 1.9 mode ? that's easy just say to RVM to use 1.9 mode:

rvm install jruby-1.6.7 --1.9

now it will be by default using 1.9 mode and trust me getting there is not that easy - at least for now.

There is a lot of things which RVM does to you and for you, with latest development version you can use other project files not only .rvmrc -> https://gist.github.com/1912050#gistcomment-86549 you could play for example using .ruby-version project file which is already supported by rbfu and always get back to RVM if you feel like you need more.

Thank you mpapis, great answer. Seems like there may be some efforts to make version managers compatible. Also looking into this discussion is interesting, especially github.com/kwatch/versionswitcher
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Bent CardanMar 11 '12 at 23:53